A Possible Different Direction
With Bleach in its final manga arc and with each chapter being the same or worse than its preceding chapter(s), I figure it's much more entertaining and productive if the community here came up with ideas of what Bleach could have been instead the weekly doses of repetitive "this writing is awful".
With regards to another comparative manga, Naruto obviously has some plot holes and half-cooked explanations for the laws that have been set in place. However, the Naruto manga at least keeps up with the readers' interest. It's entertaining to read and it can be safely stated that a lot more people look forward to reading and discussing Naruto than with Bleach.
From the beginning, I felt Kubo really limited his flexibility very quickly. He introduced to us Shinigami and Soul Society, the purifiers of the balance in souls. Hollows were introduced as well, who were seen as human souls who have stayed in the world too long because they weren't purified. Those two races had a lot of potential including the advent of the Quincies.
However, with everyone having super powers, Kubo also thought that Ichigo's out-of-place friends like Orihime and Chad could fit in by somehow gaining powers to overcome the Hollows they encountered at the time. This was okay, but then I realized that the concepts of their power did not align with anything introduced thus far. Their powers were just out of the ordinary and seemed to come from a different universe. I also thought that drawing these characters out by bringing them to Soul Society seemed to be an awful idea as well because other than fighting a couple other people, they were pretty damn useless.
Next came the Soul Society arc, which we all thought was pretty good. Other than Soul Society being oddly structured (by Central 46), I couldn't really find too many imperfections with this arc. The biggest mistake I found was Ishida losing all of his Quincy powers in one match. This dragged on too far and made him a redundant and useless character after his fight.
... (omitted the next few paragraphs because we know what went wrong here)
The concepts of the Vizards had lots of potential as well - especially the "Turn Back the Pendulum" chapters. We finally got some backstory of Soul Society and how the Vizards came out to be. In contrast, the Vizards were overrated and overhyped and they lost very easily to Aizen and his crew.
Now, for my suggestions of changes:
- eliminate orihime and chad from fighting
- foreshadow the secret society of quincies here
- slow down ichigo's power growth rate during soul society
- flush out in detail about how the four fighting skills of shinigami worked
- vizards could have been stronger (or more backstory could have been given)
- arrancar/espada did not have to be humanized
- omit nel's two friends
- kenpachi's bankai would have been a lot better than using two hands to fight
- aizen was way too overpowered; could have two other bosses or arcs replacing the time he's been given
- the hell concept was used for a subpar movie
- all of ichigo's friends became redundant fast; it would have been like bringing all the earth's special forces to fight after the cell arc
- etc.
Now, GotWoot, what are your thoughts? How could Bleach have been a better story or still be ongoing?
